Pokemon Go won't save the fat

Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

Most fads follow the same stultifying pattern: first come the early adopters, heading out to show that they’re no Luddite with their hot takes, clickbait and initial thoughts.

The over-enthusiastic, half-contemplated first responses are closely followed by the commentators keen to surf the zeitgeist. Their thinkpieces extrapolate from the trend to suggest how wider society might be impacted, usually in a way which reveals the prejudices of the author and leaves the resounding impression that the opinion sat in a drafts folder waiting for a useful incident to which it could be attached.

Pokemon Go is played out, done, just a thing we can all safely ignore, unless you’re the British Medical Journal, in which case today’s the day to announce that playing Pokemon Go is really good for your health.

Wherever the thinkpieces go, the cynical contrarians soon paddle out to swim in the opposite direction. There will always be a market for people arguing the opposite of everyone else. The frothing and foaming is designed to attract attention, sending out ripples. Sometimes riptides form when the commentators and the contrarians go against each other, sucking onlookers into a vortex that takes nobody anywhere but gets everyone excited. Soon the wave breaks and the zeitgeist rolls onto the shore of public boredom.

Hey, BMJ, July 2016 wants its news back. According to Dr Margaret McCarney the app has turned Britain into a "reclaimed playground in which to have interconnected fun." Rather than celebrating actual, purposeful exercise, we seem to have settled for cheering accidental exercise. How many calories do you burn swiping on Tinder? How great will VR headsets be for neck muscles? Can walking to the pavement to enter a driverless car "reclaim" the path from your front door as some sort of urban gym?

I like to stay in shape by regularly lifting my phone to check Twitter. During the hours that I’m shooting monsters on the PS4 I’m not tearing through the contents of the fridge, so I guess that’s a health win. It’s nice to be comforted by the news that things we already do present near-trivial health achievements. But that's different to being good for us.

Rather than concoct media-driven health news around things that are trending, we need the stone cold facts. We’re consuming too many calories. We lie to our doctors about how much we snack and drink. We don’t exercise enough. We don’t need a pat on the back; we need someone telling us what the obscene consequences of these life choices will be. While we’re heading to Morrissons to pick up a few grab bags of tortillas in our stretchy tracksuits we might collect the occasional Pidgey, but the secret bonus is that we’re also collecting life-threatening levels of cholesterol.

Rather than celebrating actual, purposeful exercise, we seem to have settled for cheering accidental exercise. How many calories do you burn swiping on Tinder?

There is a significant level of mollycoddling when it comes to public health, with the burden for our actions constantly shifting away from the individual. Cigarette packets have to all be made ugly so we find them less attractive. Sugar needs to be more expensive so we don’t eat Magnums for breakfast and a Twix sandwich for lunch. Exercise is sold to us as a form of empowerment, as if we ought not to be completely embarrassed that we can’t touch our own toes.

When it comes to Pokemon stories, you don't want to catch them allCredit:
Remko de Waal/AFP Photo

The medical profession should shame us, because they know what the likely result is of poor life choices. Instead we’re given these pats on the back for the meagre amounts of exercise we are distracted into achieving while searching for animated pictures of fictitious creatures.

So this Pokemon story isn’t only old hat, it’s also cringingly patronising to a population that has to be tricked into walking up the road.

Exercise is sold to us as a form of empowerment, as if we ought not to be completely embarrassed that we can’t touch our own toes.

We should be selling the virtues of exercise, and the thrill of walking so far that you get to a place that doesn’t even have a mobile signal. We don’t need to be told that what we do already has some fringe health merits. We need to develop an honest relationship with our health, in which we don’t lie about the mid-morning muffin we treat ourselves with, or the bottle of wine we drink at the end of the day to forget about all the Pokemon we didn’t manage to catch.

It isn’t good news that Pokemon makes us walk; it’s bad news that the nation’s health is so dire that anyone felt it necessary to celebrate the minor health advantages achievable while playing a children’s computer game.